UNIVERSITY  OF  CALIFORNIA 
AT   LOS  ANGELES 


THE  NEGRO  QUESTION 

BY   GEORGE  W. -CABLE. 


THE  QUESTION. 
I. 

The  matter  that  is  made  the  subject  of  this  paper  is  not  to  day 
the  most  prominent,  but  it  is  the  gravest,  in  American  affairs. 
It  is  one  upon  w_hich,  of  late  years,  as  we  might  say,  much  inat- 
tention has  been  carefully  bestowed.  It  has  become  a  dreaded 
question. .  We  are  not  politically  indolent.  We  are  dealing 
courageously  with  many  serious  problems.  We  admit  that  no 
nation  has  yet  so  shaken  wrong  and  oppression  from  its  skirts 
that  it  may  safely  or  honorably  sit  down  in  a  state  of  mercantile 
and  aesthetical  pre- occupation,  ,  And  yet  the  matter  that  gives  us 
daily  the  profoundest  unrest  goes  daily  by  default.  The  Nation's 
bitter  experiences  with  it  in  years  past,  the  baffling  complications 
that  men  more  cunning  than  wise  have  woven  around  it,  its 
proneness  to  swallow  up  all  other  questions  and  the  eruptions  of 
rancor  and  strife  that  attend  every  least  sign  of  its  spontaneous 
re-opening,  have  made  it  such  a  weariness  and  offence  to  the 
great  majority,  and  especially  to  our  commercial  impatience,  that 
the  public  mind  in  large  part  eagerly  accepts  the  dangerous  com- 
fort of  postponement. 

What  is  this  question  ?  Superficially  it  is  whether  a  certain 
seven  millions  of  the  people,  one-ninth  of  the  whole,  dwelling  in 
and  natives  to  the  Southern  States  of  the  Union,  and  by  law  an 
nndifferentiated  part  of  the  Nation,  have  or  have  not  the  same 
full  measure  of  the  American  citizen's  rights  that  they  would 
have  were  they  entirely  of  European  instead  of  wholly  or  partly 
African  descent.  The  seven  millions  concerning  whom  the  ques- 
tion is  asked,  answer  as  with  one  voice,  that  they  have  not. 
Millions  in  the  Northern  States,  and  thousands  in  the  Southern, 
of  whites,  make  the  same  reply.  While  other  millions  of  whites, 


in  North  and  South,  respond  not  so  often  with  a  flat  contradic- 
tion as  with  a  declaration  far  more  disconcerting.  For  the 
"  Southerner"  speaks  truly  when  he  retorts  that  nowhere  in  the 
entire  Union,  either  North  or  South,  are  the  disadvantages  of 
being  a  black,  or  partly  black,  man  confined  entirely  to  the  rela- 
tions of  domestic  life  and  private  society;  but  that  in  every  part 
there  is  a  portion,  at  least,  of  the  community  that  does  not  claim 
for,  or  even  willingly  yield  to,  the  negro,  the  whole  calendar  of 
American  rights  in  the  same  far-reaching  amplitude  and  sacred- 
ness  that  they  do  for,  or  to,  the  white  man.  The  Southern  white 
man  points  to  thousands  of  Northern  and  Western  factories, 
counting-rooms,  schools,  hotels,  churches  and  guilds,  and  these 
attest  the  truth  of  his  countercharge.1*  Nowhere  in  the  United 
States  is  there  a  whole  community  from  which  the  black  man, 
after  his  physical,  mental  and  moral  character  have  been  duly 
weighed,  if  they  be  weighed  at  all,  is  not  liable  to  suffer  an  unex- 
plained discount  for  mere  color  and  race,  which  he  would  have 
to  suffer  publicly  in  no  other  country  of  the  enlightened  world. 
This  being  the  fact,  then,  in  varying  degrees  according  to  locality, 
what  does  it  prove  ?  Only  that  this  cannot  be  the  real  point  of 
issue  between  North  and  South,  and  that  this  superficial  defini- 
tion is  not  the  true  one. 

Putting  aside  mere  differences  of  degree,  the  question  is  not, 
Are  these  things  so?  but,  Ought  they  so  to  be?  To  this  a  large 
majority  in  the  Northern  States  from  all  classes,  with  a  small 
minority  of  the  Southern  whites,  also  from  all  ranks  of  life,  and  the 
whole  seven  million  blacks,  irrespective  of  party  leanings,  answer 
No.  On  the  other  hand,  a  large  majority  of  the  whites  in  the' 
Southern  States — large  as  to  the  white  population  of  those  States, 
but  a  very  small  minority  in  the  Nation  at  large — answer  a  vehe- 
ment "Yes;  these  things  should  and  shall  be  so." 

But  how  does  this  small  minority  maintain  itself?  It  does 
so  owing  to  the  familiar  fact  that,  although  by  our  scheme  of 
government  there  is  a  constant  appeal  to  the  majority  of  the 
whole  people,  the  same  scheme  provides,  also,  for  the  defence  of 
local  interests  against  rash  actions  of  national  majorities  by  a 
parallel  counter- appeal  (constantly  through  its  Senate  and  at 
times  in  other  ways)  to  the  majority,  not  of  the  people  en  masse 


I    35-  (° 

C\\    YV 


but  of  the  States  in  their  corporate  capacity.  Now  a  very  large 
minority  in  the  Northern  States,  whose  own  private  declaration 
would  be  against  a  difference  between  white  men's  rights  and 
other  men's  rights,  nevertheless  refuse  now,  as  they  refused  before 
the  Civil  War,  to  answer  with  a  plain  yes  or  no,  but  maintain, 
with  the  Southern  white-rule  party,  that  whether  these  things 
ought  so  to  be  or  not  is  a  question  that  every  State  must  be 
allowed  to  answer  for,  and  to,  itself  alone ;  thus  so  altering  the 
voice  of  the  Nation,  when  it  speaks  by  States,  as  virtually  to 
nullify  that  negative  answer  which  would  be  given  by  a  majority 
of  the  whole  people.  In  the  Civil  Rights  bill  the  verdict  of  the 
States  was  once  given  against  all  race  discrimination  in  all  mat- 
ters of  public  rights  whatsoever,  and  for  confining  it  within  that 
true  domain — of  private  choice — to  which  the  judgment  of  other 
Christian  nations  consigns  it.  But  the  Civil  Rights  bill,  never 
practically  effective  in  the  communities  whose  upper  ranks  were 
hostile  to  it,  has  lately  perished  in  the  National  Supreme  Court, 
and  the  Senate  majority  that  passed  it  was  long  ago  lost  by  revo- 
lutions in  the  Southern  States.  Thus,  by  a  fundamental  pro- 
vision in  the  National  Government,  intended  for  the  very  purpose 
of  protecting  the  weak  from  the  strong,  a  small  national  minority 
is  enabled  to  withstand  the  pressure  of  an  immense  majority. 
Whether  this  is  by  a  right  or  wrong  use  of  the  provision  is 
an  inseparable  part  of  the  open  question.  The  weak  are  pro- 
tected from  the  strong,  but  the  still  weaker  are  delivered  into  the 
-hands  of  the  strong.  Seven  millions  of  the  Nation,  mostly  poor, 
ignorant  and  degraded,  are  left  for  the  definition  and  enjoyment 
of  rights,  worth  more  than  safety  or  property,  to  the  judgment 
of  some  ten  other  millions  of  unquestioned  intelligence  and  virtue, 
but  whose  intelligence  and  virtue  were  not  materially  less  when, 
with  a  courage  and  prowess  never  surpassed,  they  drenched  their 
own  land  with  their  own  blood  to  keep  these  darker  millions  in 
slavery.  However,  be  it  a  use  or  an  abuse  of  the  Nation's  scheme 
of  order ;  be  it  right  or  wrong ;  this  is  politically  the  stronghold 
of  the  conservative  party  in  the  Southern  States ;  and  it  is  made 
stronger  still,  steel-clad  and  turreted,  as  it  were,  with  the  tre- 
mendous advantage  of  the  status  quo — that  established  order  of 
things  which,  good  or  bad,  until  it  becomes  intolerable  to  them- 


350430 


selves,  men  will  never  attack  with  an  energy  equal  to   that  with 
which  it  is  defended. 

But  political  strength  is  little  by  itself.  The  military  maxim, 
that  no  defences  are  strong  without  force  enough  in  them  to 
occupy  their  line,  is  true  of  civil  affairs.  Entrenchment  in  the 
letter  of  a  constitution  avails  little  with  the  people  at  large  on 
either  side  of  a  question,  unless  the  line  of  that  entrenchment  is 
occupied  by  a  living  conviction  of  being  in  the  right.  The  most 
ultra-Southern  position  on  the  negro  question  has  an  element  of 
strength  close  akin  to  this.  To  be  right  is  the  only  real  neces- 
sity; but  where  is  the  community  that  will  not  make  and  defend 
with  treasure  and  blood  the  assumption  that  what  is  necessary  is 
right?  "Southerners,"  in  the  political  sense  of  the  term,  may 
sometimes  lack  a  clear,  firm-founded  belief  that  they  are  right ; 
they  may  have  no  more  than  a  restless  confidence  that  others  are 
as  wrong  as  they ;  but  they  have  at  least  a  profound  conviction 
that  they  are  moved  by  an  imminent,  unremitting,  imperative 
necessity.  Not  that  this  is  all ;  hundreds  of  thousands  of  them, 
incapacitated  by  this  very  conviction  from  falling  into  sympathy 
with  the  best  modern  thought,  have  been  taught,  and  are  learn- 
ing and  teaching,  not  only  on  the  hustings,  but  in  school,  in  col- 
lege, at  the  fireside,  through  the  daily  press,  in  the  social  circle 
and  in  church,  that  in  their  attitude  on  the  negro  question  they 
are  legally,  morally  and  entirely  right. 

/        n. 

Now,  specifically,  what  are  these  things  that  the  majority  of 
a  free  nation  says  ought  not  to  be,  while  a  sectional  majority  tri- 
umphantly maintains  they  must,  will,  ought  to  and  shall  be? 
Give  an  example  of  an  actual  grievance.  One  commonly 
esteemed  the  very  least  on  the  list  is  this  :  Suppose  a  man,  his 
wife  and  their  child,  decent  in  person,  dress  and  deportment,  but 
visibly  of  African  or  mixed  blood,  to  take  passage  on  a  railway 
train  from  some  city  of  the  Eastern  States,  as  Boston,  or  of  the 
Western,  as  Chicago.  They  will  be  thrown  publicly  into  com- 
pany with  many  others,  for  an  ordinary  American  railway  pas- 
senger coach  seats  fifty  persons,  and  a  sleeping-car  accommo  - 
dates  twenty-five  ;  and  they  will  receive  the  same  treatment  from 
railway  employes  and  passengers  as  if,  being  otherwise  just  what 


5 

they  are,  they  were  of  pure  European  descent.  Only  they  will 
be  much  less  likely  than  white  persons  to  seek,  or  be  offered,  new 
acquaintanceships.  Arriving  in  New  York,  Philadelphia,  or  any 
other  Northern  city,  they  will  easily  find  accommodations  in 
some  hotel  of  such  grade  as  they  would  be  likely  to  choose  if, 
exactly  as  they  are,  they  were  white.  They  may  chance  upon 
a  house  that  will  refuse,  on  account  of  their  color,  to  receive 
them ;  but  such  action,  if  made  known,  will  be  likely  to  receive 
a  wide  public  reprobation,  and  scant  applause  even  from  the 
press  of  the  Southern  States.  If  the  travelers  choose  to  continue 
their  journey  through  the  night,  they  will  be  free  to  hire  and 
occupy  berths  in  a  sleeping-car  and  to  use  all  its  accessories — 
basins,  towels,  pillows,  etc. — without  the  least  chance  of  moles- 
tation in  act  or  speech  from  any  one  of  the  passengers  or  em- 
ployes, let  such  passengers  or  employes  be  from  any  State  of 
the  Union,  Northern  or  Southern. 

But,  on  reaching  the  Southern  States,  the  three  travelers  will 
find  themselves  at  every  turn  under  special  and  offensive  restric- 
tions, laid  upon  them  not  for  any  demerit  of  person,  dress  or 
manners,  but  solely  and  avowedly  on  account  of  the  African  tinc- 
ture in  their  blood,  however  slight  that  may  be.  They  may  still 
be  enjoying  the  comforts  of  the  sleeping-car,  by  virtue  of  the 
ticket  bought  in  a  Northern  State  and  not  yet  fully  redeemed. 
But  they  will  find  that  while  in  one  Southern  State  they  may 
still  ride  in  an  ordinary  first-class  railway  coach  without  hin- 
drance, in  another  they  will  find  themselves  turned  away  from  the 
door  of  one  coach  and  required  to  limit  themselves  to  another, 
equal,  it  may  be,  to  the  first  in  appointments,  and  inferior  only 
in  the  social  rank  of  its  occupants.  They  may  protest  that  in 
America  there  are  no  public  distinctions  of  social  rank ;  but  this 
will  avail  them  nothing.  They  may  object  that  the  passengers 
in  the  car  from  which  they  are  excluded  are  not  of  one,  but 
palpably  of  many  and  widely  different  social  ranks,  and  that  in 
the  car  to  which  they  are  assigned  are  people  not  of  their  grade 
only  but  of  all  sorts ;  they  will  be  told  with  great  plainness  that 
there  is  but  one  kind  of  negro.  They  will  be  told  that  they  are 
assigned  equal  but  separate  accommodation  because  the  presence 
of  a  person  of  wholly,  or  partly,  African  blood  in  the  same  railway 


car  on  terms  of  social  equality  with  the  white  passengers  is  to 
those  white  passengers  an  intolerable  offence  ;  and  if  the  husband 
and  father  replies  that  it  is  itself  the  height  of  vulgarity  to  raise 
the  question  of  private  social  rank  among  strangers  in  railway 
cars,  he  will  be  fortunate  if  he  is  only  thrust  without  more  ado 
into  the  "  colored  car,"  and  not  kicked  and  beaten  by  two  or 
three  white  men  whose  superior  gentility  has  been  insulted,  and 
he  and  his  wife  and  child  put  off  at  the  next  station  to  appeal 
in  vain  to  the  courts.  For  in  court  he  will  find  that  railway 
companies  are  even  required  by  the  laws  of  the  State  to  main- 
tain this  ignominious  separation  of  all  who  betray  an  African  tinc- 
ture, refined  or  unrefined,  clean  or  unclean,  from  the  presence  of 
the  white  passengers  in  the  first-class  cars,  be  those  passengers 
ever  so  promiscuous  a  throng. 

Such  is  an  example  of  one  of  the  least  grievances  of  the  col- 
ored man  under  the  present  regime  in  the  Southern  States ;  and 
so  dull  is  the  common  perception  of  wrongs  committed  at  a  dis- 
tance, that  hundreds  of  thousands  of  intelligent,  generous,  sensi- 
tive people  in  the  Northern  States  are  daily  confessing  their  ina- 
bility to  see  any  serious  hardship  in  such  a  case,  if  only  the 
"colored  car"  be  really  equal  in  its  appointments  to  the  one  in 
which  only  white  people  of  every  sort  are  admitted ;  as  if  a  per- 
manent ignominious  distinction  on  account  of  ancestry,  made  in 
public,  by  strangers  and  in  the  enjoyment  of  common  public 
rights  were  not  an  insult  or  an  injury  unless  joined  to  some  bodily 
discomfort.  Let  it  be  plainly  understood  that  though  at  least 
scores  of  thousands  are  intelligent  and  genteel,  yet  the  vast 
majority  of  colored  people  in  the  United  States  are  neither 
refined  in  mind  nor  very  decent  in  person.  Their  race  has  never 
had  "  a  white  man's  chance."  In  America  it  has  been  under 
the  iron  yoke  of  a  slavery  that  allowed  no  distinction  of  worth  to 
cross  race  lines;  and  in  Africa  it  has  had  to  contend  for  the  mas- 
tery of  wild  nature  on  a  continent  so  unconquerable  that  for  thou- 
sands of  years  the  white  race  has  striven  in  vain  to  subdue  it, 
and  is  only  now  at  last  strong  enough  to  pierce  it,  enriched, 
enlightened  and  equipped  by  the  long  conquest  of  two  others 
less  impregnable.  For  all  that  is  known  the  black  is  "  an  inferior 
race,"  though  how,  or  how  permanently  inferior,  remains  un- 


proved.  But  the  core  of  the  colored  man's  grievance  is  that  the 
individual,  in  matters  of  right  that  do  not  justly  go  by  race,  is 
treated,  whether  man  or  child,  without  regard  to  person,  dress, 
behavior,  character  or  aspirations,  in  public  and  by  law,  as  though 
the  African  tincture,  much  or  little,  were  itself  stupidity,  squalor 
and  vice.  But  let  us  see  whether  the  grievance  grows. 

On  passing  into  a  third  Southern  State,  the  three  travelers, 
though  still  holders  of  first-class  tickets,  will  be  required  to  con- 
fine themselves  to  the  so-called  second-class  car,  a  place  never 
much  better  than  a  dram  shop.  When  the  train  stops  for  meals, 
and  the  passengers,  men,  women  and  children,  the  rough,  the 
polished,  all  throng  into  one  common  eating-room  to  receive  a 
common  fare  and  attention,  those  three  must  eat  in  the  kitchen  or 
go  hungry.  Nor  ca.fi  they  even  await  the  coming  of  a  train,  in 
some  railway  stations,  except  in  a  separate  "  colored  waiting- 
room."  If  they  tarry  in  some  Southern  city  they  will  encounter 
the  most  harassing  and  whimsical  treatment  of  their  most  ordinary 
public  rights  as  American  citizens.  They  may  ride  in  any  street 
car,  however  crowded,  seated  beside,  or  even  crammed  in  among, 
white  men  or  women  of  any,  or  every,  station  of  life  ;  but  at  the 
platform  of  the  railway  train,  or  at  the  threshold  of  any  theatre, 
or  concert,  or  lecture  hall,  they  will  be  directed  to  the  most 
undesirable  part  of  the  house  and  compelled  to  take  that  or 
nothing.  They  will  find  that  the  word  "  public  "  rarely  means 
public  to  them ;  that  they  may  not  even  draw  books  from  the 
public  libraries  or  use  their  reading  rooms. 

Should  the  harried  and  exasperated  man  be  so  fierce  or  indis- 
creet as  to  quarrel  with,  and  strike,  some  white  man,  he  wilt  stand 
several  chances  to  a  white  man's  one  of  being  killed  on  the  spot. 
If  neither  killed  nor  half-killed,  but  brought  into  court,  he  will 
have  ninety-nine  chances  in  a  hundred  of  confronting  a  jury 
from  which,  either  by,  or  else  in  spite  of,  legal  provision,  men  of 
African  tincture  have  been  wholly  or  almost  wholly  excluded. 
If  sent  to  prison  he  must  come  under  a  penal  system  which  the 
report  of  the  National  Commissioner  of  Prisons  officially  pro- 
nounces "a  blot  upon  civilization."  He  will  find  the  population 
of  the  State  prisons  often  nine-tenths  colored,  divided  into  chain- 
gangs,  farmed  out  to  private  hands,  even  subleased,  and  worked 


8 

in  the  mines,  quarries,  in  railway  construction  and  on  turnpikes, 
under  cordons  of  Winchester  rifles  ;  veritable  quarry  slaves.  He 
will  find  most  of  the  few  white  convicts  under  this  system  suffer- 
ing the  same  outrages ;  but  he  will  also  find  that  the  system 
itself  disappears  wherever  this  general  attitude  toward  the  black 
race  disappears,  and  that  where  it  and  its  outrages  continue,  the 
race  line  in  prison  is  obliterated  only  when  the  criminal  becomes 
a  negotiable  commodity  and  it  costs  the  lessee  money  to  main- 
tain the  absurd  distinction.  He  would  find  the  number  of  col- 
ored men  within  those  deadly  cordons  out  of  all  proportion  to 
the  colored  population  outside,  as  compared  with  the  percentages 
of  blacks  in  and  out  of  prison  in  States  not  under  this  regime. 
There  are  State  prisons  in  which  he  would  find  the  colored  con- 
victs serving  sentences  whose  average  is  nearly  twice  that  of  the 
white  convicts  in  the  same  places  for  the  same  crimes.*  In  the 
same  or  other  prisons  he  would  find  colored  youths  and  boys 
by  scores,  almost  by  hundreds,  consorting  with  older  criminals, 
and  under  sentences  of  seven,  ten,  twenty  years,  while  the  State 
Legislatures  vote  down  year  after  year  the  efforts  of  a  few  cour- 
ageous and  humane  men  either  to  establish  reformatories  for  col-, 
ored  youth,  or  to  introduce  the  element  of  reform  into  their  so- 
called  penitentiaries.  Should  he  some  day  escape  alive  across 
the  dead-line  of  Winchesters,  he  will  be  hunted  with  bloodhounds. 
But  suppose  he  commits  no  offence  against  person  or  prop- 
erty ;  he  will  make  another  list  of  discoveries.  He  will  find  that 
no  select  school,  under  "  Southern "  auspices,  will  receive  his 
child.  That  if  he  sends  the  child  to  a  public  school  it  must  be, 
as  required  by  law,  to  a  school  exclusively  for  colored  children, 
even  if  his  child  is  seven  times  more  white  than  colored.  Though 
his  child  be  gentle,  well-behaved,  cleanly  and  decorously  dressed, 
and  the  colored  school  so  situated  as  to  be  naturally  and  properly 
the  choice  of  the  veriest  riff-raff  of  the  school  population,  he  will 
have  no  more  liberty  than  before ;  he  will  be  told  again,  "  We 
know  but  one  kind  of  negro."  The  child's  father  and  mother 
may  themselves  be  professional  instructors ;  but  however  highly 
trained ;  of  whatever  reputation  for  moral  and  religious  charac- 
ter ;  however  talented  as  teachers  or  disciplinarians ;  holding  the 

*See  "The  Silent  South,"  Century  Magazine,  September,  1885. 


diploma  of  whatever,  college  or  university,  Wellesley,  Vassar, 
Yale,  Cornell ;  and  of  whatever  age  or  experience,  they  will  find 
themselves  shut  out  by  law  from  becoming  teachers  in  any  pub- 
lic school  for  white  children,  whether  belonging  to,  and  filled  from, 
the  "  best  neighborhood,"  or  in,  and  for,  the  lowest  quarters  of 
alleys  and  shanties.  They  will  presently  learn  that  in  many  hun- 
dreds of  Southern  school-districts  where  the  populations  are  too 
sparse  and  poor  to  admit  of  separate  schools  for  the  two  races, 
the  children  of  both  are  being  brought  up  in  ignorance  of  the 
very  alphabet  rather  than  let  them  enjoy  a  common  public  right 
under  a  common  roof.  They  will  find  that  this  separation  is  not 
really  based  on  any  incapacity  of  children  to  distinguish  between 
public  and  private  social  relations ;  but  that  the  same  separation 
is  enforced  among  adults ;  and  that  while  every  Southern  State 
is  lamenting  its  inability  to  make  anything  like  an  adequate  out- 
lay for  public  education,  and  hundreds  of  thousands  of  colored 
children  are  growing  up  in  absolute  illiteracy  largely  for  lack  of 
teachers  and  school-houses,  an  expensive  isolation  of  race  from 
.race  is  kept  up  even  in  the  normal  schools  and  teachers'  insti- 
tutes. Even  in  the  house  of  worship  and  the  divinity  school 
they  would  find  themselves  pursued  by  the  same  invidious  dis- 
tinctions and  separations  that  had  followed  them  at  every  step, 
and  would  follow  and  attend  them  still  to,  and  in,  the  very  alms- 
house  and  insane  asylum. 

III. 

And  then  they  would  make  one  more  discovery.  They 
would  find  that  not  only  were  they  victims  of  bolder  infractions 
of  the  most  obvious  common  rights  of  humanity  than  are  offered 
to  any  people  elsewhere  in  Christendom,  save  only -f he  Chinaman 
in  the  far  West,  but  that  to  make  the  oppression  more  exasper- 
ating still,  there  is  not  a  single  feature  of  it  in  any  one  State, 
though  justifiable  on  the  plea  of  stern  necessity,  that  does  not 
stand  condemned  by  its  absence,  under  the  same  or  yet  more 
pronounced  conditions,  in  some  other  State.  Sometimes  even 
one  part  of  a  State  will  utterly  stultify  the  attitude  held  in 
another  part.  In  Virginia  or  South  Carolina  a  colored  person 
of  decent  appearance  or  behavior  may  sit  in  any  first-class  rail- 
way car,  but  in  Georgia  the  law  forbids  it,  and  in  Kentucky  the 


10 

law  leaves  him  to  the  caprice  of  railway  managements,  some  of 
which  accord  and  others  withhold  the  right.  In  some  States  he 
is  allowed  in  the  jury  box,  in  some  he  is  kept  out  by  the'  letters 
of  statutes,  and  in  some  by  evasions  of  them ;  while  in  Tennessee 
some  counties  admit  him  to  jury  duty  and  others  exclude  him 
from  it.  In  one  or  two  Southern  cities,  the  teachers  in  colored 
public  schools  must  be  white.  In  certain  others  they  must  be 
colored ;  and  in  still  others  they  may  be  either.  In  Louisiana 
certain  railway  trains  and  steamboats  run  side  by  side,  within  a 
mile  of  one  another,  where  in  the  trains  a  negro  or  mulatto  may 
sit  where  he  will,  and  on  the  boats  he  must  confine  himself  to  a 
separate  quarter  called  the  "freedman's  bureau." 

The  Civil  Rights  bill  was  fought  for  years  and  finally  de- 
stroyed, with  the  plea  that  it  infringed  the  right  of  common  car- 
riers and  entertainers  to  use  their  own  best  judgment  in  distrib- 
uting their  passengers  and  guests  with  an  equitable  consideration 
for  the  comfort  of  all.  In  fact,  it  only  forbade  distributions  that, 
so  far  from  consulting  the  common  comfort,  humor  the  demand 
of  one  crudely  self-assorted  private  social  class  for  an  invariable, 
ignominious  isolation  or  exclusion  of  another.  Yet  the  same 
States  and  persons  who  so  effectually  made  this  plea,  either  allow 
and  encourage  its  use  as  a  cover  for  this  tyrannous  inequity,  or 
else  themselves  ignore  their  own  plea,  usurp  the  judgment  of 
common  carriers  and  entertainers,  and  force  them  by  law  to 
make  this  race  distribution,  whether  they  'deem  it  best  or  not. 

And  yet  again,  all  over  the  South  there  are  scattered  colleges, 
academies  and  tributary  grammar  schools,  established  and  main- 
tained at  the  expense  of  individuals  and  societies  in  the  Northern 
States,  for  the  education,  at  low  rates  of  tuition  and  living,  of  the 
aspiring  poor,  without  hindrance  as  to  race  or  sex.  For  more 
than  twenty  years  these  establishments  have  flourished  and  been 
a  boon  to  the  African- American,  as  well  as  to  the  almost  equally 
noted  "  poor  whites  "  of  the  Southern  mountain  regions,  sand- 
hills and  "pauper  counties,"  and  through  both  these  classes  to 
the  ultra-Southern  white  man  of  the  towns  and  plantations — a 
boon  the  national  value  of  which  neither  he  nor  one  in  a  thou- 
sand of  its  hundreds  of  thousands  of  Northern  supporters  has  an 
adequate  conception,  else  these  establishments  would  receive 


1 1 

seven  times  their  present  pecuniary  support.  These  institutions 
have  graduated  some  hundreds  of  colored  students  as  physicians 
and  lawyers.  At  one  time  lately  they  had  more  than  eight  hun- 
dred divinity  students,  nearly  all  of  them  colored.  Their  pupils 
of  all  grades  aggregate  over  seventeen  thousand,  and  the  sixteen 
thousand  colored  teachers  in  the  public  schools  of  the  South  have 
come  almost  entirely  from  them.  But  now  in  these  institutions 
there  is  a  complete  ignoring  of  those  race  distinctions  in  the 
enjoyment  of  common  public  rights  so  religiously  enforced  on 
every  side  beyond  their  borders;  and  yet  none  of  those  unnam- 
able  disasters  have  come  to  or  from  them  which  the  advocates 
of  these  onerous  public  distinctions  and  separations  predict  and 
dread.  On  scores  of  Southern  hilltops  these  schools  stand  out 
almost  totally  without  companions  or  competitors  in  their  pecu- 
liar field,  so  many  refutations,  visible  and  complete,  of  the  idea 
that  any  interest  requires  the  colored  American  citizen  to  be 
limited  in  any  of  the  civil  rights  that  would  be  his  without  ques- 
tion if  the  same  man  were  white.  Virtually,  the  whole  guild  of 
educators  in  the  Southern  States,  from  once  regarding  these 
institutions  with  unqualified  condemnation  and  enmity,  are  now 
becoming  their  friends  and,  in  some  notable  cases,  their  converts. 
So  widely  have  the  larger  colleges  demonstrated  their  unique 
beneficence  that  in  some  cases  Southern  State  Governments, 
actively  hostile  to  the  privileges  of  civil  liberty  they  teach  and 
apply,  are  making  small  annual  appropriations  in  contribution 
toward  their  support.  So  bristling  with  inconsistencies,  good 
and  bad,  would  our  three  travelers  find  this  tyrannous  and 
utterly  unrepublican  regime.  Nowhere  else  in  enlightened  lands 
and  in  this  day  do  so  many  millions  see  their  own  fellow-citizens 
so  play  football  with  their  simplest  public  rights ;  for  the  larger 
part  of  the  Southern  white  people  do  with  these  laws  of  their 
own  making  what  they  please,  keeping  or  breaking  them  as  con- 
venient. 

But  their  discoveries  would  still  go  on.  They  would  hear 
these  oppressions  justified  by  Southern  white  people  of  the  high- 
est standing,  and — more's  the  shame — by  Northern  tourists  in  the 
South,  on  the  ground  that  the  people  upon  whom  they  are  laid 
are  a  dull,  vicious,  unclean  race,  contact  with  which  would  be 


12 

physically,  intellectually  and  morally  offensive  and  mischievous 
to  a  higher  race.  And  when  they  might  ask  why  the  lines  of 
limited  rights  are  not  drawn  around  the  conspicuously  dull,  vic- 
ious and  unclean  of  both  races  for  the  protection  of  the  opposite 
sort  in  both,  they  would  come  face  to  face  upon  the  amazing  as- 
sumption that  the  lowest  white  man  is  somehow  a  little  too  good 
for  even  so  much  contact  with  the  highest  black  as  may  be  neces- 
sary for  a  common  enjoyment  of  public  rights ;  and,  therefore, 
that  no  excellence,  moral,  mental  or  physical,  inborn  or  attained, 
can  buy  for  a  "man  of  color"  from  these  separationists  any  distinc- 
tion between  the  restrictions  of  his  civil  liberty  and  those  of  the  stu- 
pidest and  squalidest  of  his  race,  or  bring  him  one  step  nearer  to  the 
enjoyment  of  the  rights  of  a  white  man  ;  or,  if  at  all,  then  only  as  a 
matter  of  the  white  man's  voluntary  condescension  and  with  the 
right  disguised  as  a  personal  privilege.  They  would  find  that  the 
race  line  is  not  a  line  of  physical,  moral  or  intellectual  excellence 
at  all.  Stranger  yet,  they  would  learn  that  no  proportion  of 
white  men's  blood  in  their  own  veins,  unless  it  washes  out  the 
very  memory  of  their  African  tincture,  can  get  them  abatement 
of  those  deprivations  decreed  for  a  dull,  vicious  and  unclean  race, 
but  that — men,  women  and  children  alike — hundreds  and  thou- 
sands of  mixed  race  are  thus  daily  and  publicly  punished  by  their 
brothers  for  the  sins  of  their  fathers.  They  would  find  the  race 
line  not  a  race  line  at  all. 

They  would  find  that  the  mere  contact  of  race  with  race  is 
not  the  matter  objected  to,  but  only  any  and  every  sort  of  con- 
tact on  an  equal  footing.  They  would  find  that  what  no  money, 
no  fame,  no  personal  excellence  and  no  fractional  preponderance 
of  European  blood  can  buy,  can  nevertheless  be  bought  instantly 
and  without  one  of  these  things  by  the  simple  surrender  of  the 
attitude  of  public  equality.  They  would  find  that  the  entire  es- 
sense  of  the  offense,  any  and  every  where  where  the  race  line  is 
insisted  on,  is  the  apparition  of  the  colored  man  or  woman  as  his 
or  her  own  master ;  that  masterhood  is  all  that  all  this  tyranny  is 
intended  to  preserve,  and  that  the  moment  the  relation  of  master 
and  servant  is  visibly  established  between  race  and  race  there  is 
the  hush  of  peace. 

"What  is  that  negro — what  is  that  mulattress — doing  in  here  ?  " 


13 

asks  one  private  individual  of  another  in  some  public  place,  and 
the  other  replies  : 

"  That's  nothing  ;  he  is  the  servant  of  that  white  man  just  be- 
hind him;  she  is  the  nurse  of  those  children  in  front  of  her." 

"Oh,  all  right."  And  the  "cordial  relation"  is  restored. 
Such  conversation,  or  equivalent  soliloquy,  occurs  in  the  South  a 
hundred  times  a  day. 

The  surrender  of  this  one  point  by  the  colored  man  or  woman 
buys  more  than  peace — it  buys  amity  ;  an  amity  clouded  only  by 
a  slight  but  distinct  and  constant  air  and  tone  of  command  on  the 
one  part,  a  very  gross  and  imperfect  attitude  of  deference  on  the 
other,  and  the  perpetual  unrest  that  always  accompanies  forcible 
possession  of  anything.  But  since  no  people  ever  compelled 
another  to  pay  too  much  for  peace  without  somehow  paying  too 
much  for  it  themselves,  the  master-caste  tolerates,  with  unsurpassed 
supineness  and  unconsciousness,  a  more  indolent,  inefficient,  slov- 
enly, unclean,  untrustworthy,  ill-mannered,  noisy,  disrespectful, 
disputatious,  and  yet  servile  domestic  and  public  menial  service 
than  is  tolerated  by  any  other  enlightened  people.  Such  is  but 
one  of  the  smallest  of  many  payments  which  an  intelligent  and 
refined  community  has  to  make  for  maintaining  the  lines  of  mas- 
ter and  servant-hood  on  caste  instead  of  on  individual  ambition 
and  capacity,  and  for  the  forcible  equalization  of  millions  of  un- 
equal individuals  under  one  common  public  disdain.  Other  and 
greater  payments  and  losses  there  are,  moral,  political,  industrial, 
commercial,  as  we  shall  see  when  we  turn,  as  now  we  must,  to 
the  other  half  of  this  task,  and  answer  the  two  impatient  questions 
that  jostle  each  other  for  precedence  as  they  spring  from  this  still 
incomplete  statement  of  the  condition  of  affairs. 

TWO    FUNDAMENTAL   PRINCIPLES   AT   WAR. 

The  two  questions  are  these  :  If  the  case  is  so  plain,  then,  in 
the  first  place,  how  can  the  millions  of  intelligent  and  virtuous 
white  people  of  the  South  make  such  a  political,  not  to  say  such 
a  moral,  mistake  ?  And,  in  the  second  place,  how  can  the  over- 
whelming millions  of  the  North,  after  spending  the  frightful  costs 
they  spent  in  the  war  of  '6i-'65,  tolerate  this  emasculation  of  the 
American  freedom  which  that  war  is  supposed  to  have  secured  to 
all  alike  ? 


THE   ANSWER. 
I. 

As  to  the  Southern  people  the  answer  is  that,  although  the 
Southern  master-class  now  cordially  and  unanimously  admit  the 
folly  of  slave-holding,  yet  the  fundamental  article  of  political  faith 
on  which  slavery  rested  has  not  been  displaced.  As  to  the  peo- 
ple of  the  North  the  answer  is  simpler  still :  the  Union  is  saved. 

The  Northern  cause  in  our  civil  war  was  not  primarily  the 
abolition  of  slavery,  although  many  a  Northern  soldier  and  cap- 
tain fought  mainly  for  this  and  cared  for  no  other  issue  while  this 
remained.  The  Southern  cause  was  not  merely  for  disunion, 
though  many  a  Southern  soldier  and  captain  would  never  have 
taken  up  the  sword  to  defend  slave-holding  stripped  of  the  dis- 
guise of  State  sovereignty.  The  Northern  cause  was  pre-emin- 
ently the  National  unity.  Emancipation — the  emancipation  of 
the  negroes — was  not  what  the  North  fought  for,  but  only  what 
it  fought  with.  The  right  to  secede  was  not  what  the  South 
fought  for,  but  only  what  it  fought  with.  The  great  majority  of 
the  Southern  white  people  loved  the  Union  and  consented  to  its 
destruction  only  when  there  seemed  to  be  no  other  way  to  save 
slavery ;  the  great  bulk  of  the  North  consented  to  destroy  slavery 
only  when  there  seemed  no  other  way  to  save  the  Union.  To  put 
in  peril  the  Union  on  one  side  and  slavery  on  the  other  was 
(  enongh,  when  nothing  else  was  enough,  to  drench  one  of  the 
greatest  and  happiest  lands  on  earth  with  the  blood  of  hundreds 
of  thousands  of  her  own  children.  Now,  what  thing  of  supreme 
value  rested  on  this  Union,  and  what  on  this  slavery,  that  they 
should  have  been  defended  at  such  cost  ?  There  rested  on,  or 
more  truly  there  underlay,  each  a  fundamental  principle,  conceived 
to  be  absolutely  essential  to  the  safety,  order,  peace,  fortune  and 
honor  of  society  ;  and  these  two  principles  were  antagonistic. 

They  were  more  than  antagonistic  ;  they  were  antipodal  and 
irreconcilable.  No  people  that  hold  either  of  these  ideas  as  car- 
dinal in  their  political  creed  will  ever  allow  the  other  to  be  forced 
upon  them  from  without  so  long  as  blood  and  lives  will  buy  de- 
liverance. Both  were  brought  from  the  mother  country  when 
America  was  originally  colonized,  and  both  have  their  advocates 


is 

in  greater  or  less  number  in  the  Northern  States,  in  the  Southern, 
and  wherever  there  is  any  freedom  of  thought  and  speech. 

The  common  subject  of  the  two  is  the  great  lower  mass  of  so- 
ciety. The  leading  thought  of  the  one  is  that  mass's  elevation,  of 
the  other  its  subjugation.  The  one  declares  the  only  permanent 
safety  of  public  society,  and  its  highest  development,  to  require 
the  constant  elevation  of  the  lower,  and  thus  of  the  whole  mass, 
by  the  free  self-government  of  all  under  one  common  code  of 
equal  civil  rights.  It  came  from  England,  but  it  was  practically, 
successfully,  beneficently  applied  on  a  national  scale  first  in  the 
United  States,  and  Americans  claim  the  right  to  call  it,  and  it  pre- 
eminently, the  American  idea,  promulgated  and  established,  not 
by  Northerners  or  Southerners,  one  greatly  more  than  another, 
but  by  the  unsectional  majority  of  a  whole  new  Nation  born  of 
the  idea.  The  other  principle  declares  public  safety  and  highest 
development  to  require  the  subjugation  of  the  lower  mass  under 
the  arbitrary  protective  supremacy  of  an  untitled  but  hereditary 
privileged  class,  a  civil  caste.  Not,  as  it  is  commonly  miscalled, 
an  aristocracy,  for  within  one  race  it  takes  in  all  ranks  of  society, 
not  an  aristocracy,  for  an  aristocracy  exists,  presumably,  at  least, 
with  the  wide  consent  of  all  classes,  and  men  in  any  rank  of  life 
may  have  some  hope  to  attain  to  it  by  extraordinary  merit  and 
service ;  but  a  caste,  not  the  embodiment  of  a  modern  European 
idea,  but  the  resuscitation  of  an  ancient  Asiatic  one. 

That  one  of  these  irreconcilable  ideas  should  by-and-by  be- 
come all-dominant  in  the  formation  of  public  society  in  one  region, 
and  its  opposite  in  the  other  region,  is  due  to  original  differences 
in  the  conditions  under  which  the  colonies  were  settled.  In  the 
South,  the  corner-stone  of  the  social  structure  was  made  the  plan- 
tation idea — wide  lands,  an  accomplished  few,  and  their  rapid 
aggrandizement  by  the  fostering  oversight  and  employment  of  an 
unskilled  many.  In  the  North,  it  was  the  village  and  town  idea — 
the  notion  of  farm  and  factory,  skilled  labor,  an  intelligent  many, 
and  ultimate  wealth  through  an  assured  public  tranquillity.  Noth- 
ing could  be  more  natural  than  for  African  slavery,  once  intro- 
duced, to  flourish  and  spread  under  the  one  idea,  and  languish 
and  die  under  the  other.  It  is  high  time  to  be  done  saying  that 
the  South  retained  slavery  and  the  North  renounced  it  merely  be- 


i6 

cause  to  the  one  it  was,  and  to  the  other  it  was  not,  lucrative.  It 
was  inevitable  that  the  most  conspicuous  feature  of  one  civiliza- 
tion should  become  the  public  schoolhouse,  and  of  the  other  the 
slave  yard.  Who  could  wish  to  raise  the  equally  idle  and  offen- 
sive question  of  praise  and  blame  ?  When  Northerners  came 
South  by  thousands  and  made  their  dwelling  there,  ninety-nine 
hundredths  of  them  fell  into  our  Southern  error  up  to  the  eyes, 
and  there  is  nothing  to  prove  that  had  the  plantation  idea,  to  the 
exclusion  of  the  village  idea,  been  planted  in  all  the  colonies,  we 
should  not  by  this  time  have  had  a  West  Indian  civilization  from 
Florida  to  Oregon.  But  it  was  not  to  be  so.  Wherever  the  farm 
village  became  the  germinal  unit  of  social  organization,  there 
was  developed  in  its  most  comprehensive  integrity,  that  American 
idea  of  our  Northern  and  Southern  fathers,  the  representative 
self-government  of  the  whole  people  by  the  constant  free  consent 
of  all  to  the  frequently  reconsidered  choice  of  the  majority. 

Such  a  scheme  can  be  safe  only  when  it  includes  inherently  the 
continual  and  diligent  elevation  of  that  lower  mass  which  human 
society  everywhere  is  constantly  precipitating.  But  slave-holding 
on  any  large  scale  could  not  make  even  a  show  of  public  safety  with- 
out the  continual  and  diligent  debasement  of  its  enslaved  lower  mil- 
lions. Wherever  it  prevailed  it  was  bound  by  the  natural  neces- 
sities of  its  own  existence  to  undermine  and  corrode  the  National 
scheme.  It  mistaught  the  new  generations  of  the  white  South 
that  the  slave-holding  fathers  of  the  Republic  were  approvers  and 
advocates  of  that  sad  practice,  which  by  their  true  histories  we 
know  they  would  gladly  have  destroyed.  It  mistaught  us  to  con- 
strue the  right  of  a  uniform  government  of  all  by  all,  not  as  a 
common  and  inalienable  right  of  man,  but  as  a  privilege  that  be- 
came a  right  only  by  a  people's  merit,  and  which  our  forefathers 
bought  with  the  blood  of  the  Revolution  in  1776- '83,  and  which 
our  slaves  did  not  and  should  not  be  allowed  to  acquire.  It  mis- 
taught  us  to  seek  prosperity  in  the  concentration  instead  of  the 
diffusion  of  wealth,  to  seek  public  safety  in  a  state  of  siege  rather 
than  in  a  state  of  peace  ;  it  gave  us  subjects  instead  of  fellow-cit- 
i/.ens,  and  falsely  threatened  us  with  the  utter  shipwreck  of  pub- 
lic and  private  society  if  we  dared  accord  civil  power  to  the  de- 
graded millions  to  whom  we  had  forbidden  patriotism.  Thus,  it 


17 

could  not  help  but  misteach  us  also  to  subordinate  to  its  preser- 
vation the  maintenance  of  a  National  union  with  those  Northern 
communities  to  whose  whole  scheme  of  order  slave-holding  was 
intolerable,  and  to  rise  at  length  against  the  will  of  the  majority 
and  dissolve  the  Union  when  that  majority  refused  to  give  slave- 
holding  the  National  sanction. 

The  other  system  taught  the  inherent  right  of  all  human  soci- 
ety to  self-government.  It  taught  the  impersonal  civil  equality 
of  all.  It  admitted  that  the  private,  personal  inequality  of  indi- 
viduals is  inevitable,  necessary,  right  and  good  ;  but  condemned 
its  misuse  to  set  up  arbitrary  public  inequalities.  It  declared 
public  equality  to  be,  on  the  one  hand,  the  only  true  and  adequate 
counterpoise  against  private  inequalities,  and,  on  the  other,  the 
best  protector  and  promotor  of  just  private  inequalities  against 
unjust.  It  held  that  virtue,  intelligence  and  wealth  are  their  own 
sufficient  advantage,  and  need  for  self-protection  no  arbitrary 
civil  preponderance  ;  that  their  powers  of  self-protection  are  nev- 
er inadequate  save  when  by  forgetting  equity  they  mass  and  ex- 
asperate ignorance,  vice  and  poverty  against  them.  It  insisted 
that  there  is  no  safe  protection  but  self-protection  ;  that  poverty 
needs  at  least  as  much  civil  equipment  for  self- protection  as  prop- 
erty needs ;  that  the  right  and  liberty  to  acquire  intelligence,  vir- 
tue and  wealth  are  just  as  precious  as  the  right  and  liberty  to 
maintain  them,  and  need  quite  as  much  self-protection  ;  that  the 
secret  of  public  order  and  highest  prosperity  is  the  common  and 
equal  right  of  all  lawfully  to  acquire  as  well  as  retain  every  equi- 
table means  of  self-aggrandizement,  and  that  this  right  is  assured 
to  all  only  through  the  consent  of  all  to  the  choice  of  the  majority 
frequently  appealed  to  without  respect  of  persons.  And  last,  it 
truly  taught  that  a  government  founded  on  these  principles  and 
holding  them  essential  to  public  peace  and  safety  might  comfort- 
ably bear  the  proximity  of  alien  neighbors,  whose  ideas  of  right 
and  order  were  not  implacably  hostile ;  but  that  it  had  no  power 
to  abide  unless  it  could  put  down  any  internal  mutiny  against 
that  choice  of  the  majority  which  was,  as  it  were,  the  Nation's 
first  commandment. 

The  war  was  fought  and  the  Union  save"d.     Fought  as  it  was, 
on  the  issue  of  the  consent  of  all  to  the  choice  of  the   majority, 


i8 

the  conviction  forced  its  way  that  the  strife  would  never  end  in 
peace  until  the  liberty  of  self-government  was  guaranteed  to  the 
entire  people,  and  slavery,  as  standing  for  the  doctrine  of  public 
safety  by  subjugation,  destroyed.  Hence,  first,  emancipation,  and 
then,  enfranchisement.  And  now  even  the  Union  saved  is  not 
the  full  measure  of  the  Nation's  triumphs ;  but,  saved  once  by 
arms,  it  seems  at  length  to  have  achieved  a  better  and  fuller 
salvation  still ;  for  the  people  of  the  once  seceded  States,  with 
a  sincerity  that  no  generous  mind  can  question,  have  returned  to 
their  old  love  of  this  saved  Union,  and  the  great  North,  from  East 
to  utmost  West,  full  of  elation,  and  feeling  what  one  may  call  the 
onus  of  the  winning  side,  cries  "  Enough  !  "  and  asks  no  more. 

II. 

Thus  stands  the  matter  to-day.  Old  foes  are  clasping  hands 
on  fields  where  once  they  met  in  battle,  and  touching  glasses 
across  the  banqueting  board,  pledging  long  life  to  the  Union  and 
prosperity  to  the  new  South,  but  at  every  feast  there  is  one  empty 
seat. 

Why  should  one  seat  be  ever  empty,  and  every  guest  afraid 
to  look  that  way  ?  Because  the  Southern  white  man  swears  upon 
his  father's  sword  that  none  but  a  ghost  shall  ever  sit  there.  And 
a  ghost  is  there  ;  the  ghost  of  that  old  heresy  of  public  safety  by 
the  mass's  subjugation.  This  is  what  the  Northern  people  can- 
not understand.  This  is  what  makes  the  Southern  white  man  an 
enigma  to  all  the  world  beside,  if  not  also  to  himself.  To-day 
the  pride  with  which  he  boasts  himself  a  citizen  of  the  United 
States  and  the  sincerity  with  which  he  declares  for  free  gov- 
ernment as  the  only  safe  government  cannot  be  doubted  ;  to- 
morrow comes  an  explosion,  followed  by  such  a  misinterpretation 
of  what  free  government  requires  and  forbids  that  it  is  hard  to 
identify  him  with  the  nineteenth  century.  Emancipation  de- 
stroyed domestic  bondage ;  enfranchisement,  as  nearly  as  its  mere 
decree  can,  has  abolished  public  servitude  ;  how,  then,  does  this 
old  un-American,  undemocratic  idea  of  subjugation,  which  our 
British  mother  country  and  Europe  as  well,  are  so  fast  repudi- 
ating— how  does  it  remain  ?  Was  it  not  founded  in  these  two- 
forms  of  slavery  ?  The  mistake  lies  just  there  :  They  were 
founded  in  it,  and  removing  them  has  not  removed  it. 


19 

It  has  always  been  hard  for  the  North  to  understand  the  alac- 
rity with  which  the  ex- slaveholder  learned  to  condemn  as  a  mor- 
al and  economic  error  that  slavery  in  defense  of  which  he  en- 
dured four  years  of  desolating  war.  But  it  was  genuine,  and  here 
is  the  explanation  :  He  believed  personal  enslavement  essential  to 
subjugation.  Emancipation  at  one  stroke  proved  it  was  not. 
But  it  proved  no  more.  Unfortunately  for  the  whole  Nation 
there  was  already  before  emancipation  came,  a  defined  status,  a 
peculiar  niche,  waiting  for  freed  negroes.  They  were  nothing 
new.  Nor  was  it  new  to  lose  personal  ownership  in  one's  slave. 
When,  under  emancipation,  no  one  else  could  own  him,  we  quickly 
saw  he  was  not  lost  at  all.  There  he  stood,  beggar  to  us  for 
room  for  the  sole  of  his  foot,  the  land  and  all  its  appliances  ours, 
and  he,  by  the  stress  of  his  daily  needs,  captive  to  the  land.  The 
moment  he  fell  to  work  of  his  own  free  will,  we  saw  that  emanci- 
pation was  even  more  ours  than  his ;  public  order  stood  fast,  our 
homes  were  safe,  our  firesides  uninvaded  ;  he  still  served,  we  still 
ruled  ;  all  need  of  holding  him  in  private  bondage  was  disproved, 
and  when  the  notion  of  necessity  vanished  the  notion  of  right 
vanished  with  it.  Emancipation  had  destroyed  private,  but  it 
had  hardly  disturbed  public  subjugation.  The  ex-slave  was  not 
a  free  man ;  he  was  only  a  free  negro. 

Then  the  winners  of  the  war  saw  that  the  great  issue  which 
had  jeopardized  the  Union  was  not  settled.  The  Government's 
foundation  principle  was  not  re-established,  and  could  not  be 
while  millions  of  the  country's  population  were  without  a  voice 
as  to  who  should  rule,  who  should  judge  and  what  should  be  law. 
But,  as  we  have  seen,  the  absolute  civil  equality  of  privately  and 
socially  unequal  men  was  not  the  whole  American  idea.  It  was 
counterbalanced  by  an  enlarged  application  of  the  same  principle 
in  the  absolute  equality  of  unequal  States  in  the  Federal  Union, 
one  of  the  greatest  willing  concessions  ever  made  by  stronger 
political  bodies  to  weaker  ones  in  the  history  of  government. 
Now  manifestly  this  great  concession  of  equality  among  the  un- 
equal States  becomes  inordinate,  unjust  and  dangerous  when  mil- 
lions of  the  people  in  one  geographical  section,  native  to  the  soil, 
of  native  parentage,  having  ties  of  interest  and  sympathy  with  no 
other  land,  are  arbitrarily  denied  that  political  equality  within  the 


20 

States  which  obtains  elsewhere  throughout  the  Union.  This 
would  make  us  two  countries.  But  we  cannot  be  two  merely 
federated  countries  without  changing  our  whole  plan  of  govern- 
ment ;  and  we  cannot  be  one  without  a  common  foundation. 
Hence  the  freedman's  enfranchisement.  It  was  given  him  not 
only  because  enfranchisement  was  his  only  true  emancipation,  but 
also  because  it  was,  and  is,  impossible  to  withhold  it  and  carry  on 
American  government  on  American  ground  principles.  Neither 
the  Nation's  honor  nor  its  safety  could  allow  the  restoration  of 
revolted  States  to  their  autonomy  with  their  populations  divided 
by  lines  of  status  abhorrent  to  the  whole  National  structure. 

Northern  men  often  ask  perplexedly  if  the  freedman's  enfran- 
chisement was  not,  as  to  the  South,  premature  and  inexpedient ; 
while  Southern  men  as  often  call  it  the  one  vindictive  act  of  the 
conqueror,  as  foolish  as  it  was  cruel.  It  was  cruel.  Not  by  in- 
tention, and,  it  may  be,  unavoidably,  but  certainly  it  was  not 
cruel  for  its  haste,  but  for  its  tardiness.  Had  enfranchisement 
come  into  effect,  as  emancipation  did,  while  the  smoke  of 
the  war's  last  shot  was  still  in  the  air,  when  force  still  ruled 
unquestioned  and  civil  order  and  system  had  not  yet  super- 
seded martial  law,  the  agonies,  the  shame  and  the  incalculable 
losses  of  the  Reconstruction  period  that  followed  might  have 
been  spared  the  South  and  the  Nation.  Instead  there  came  two 
unlucky  postponements,  the  slow  doling  out  of  re-enfranchisement 
to  the  best  intelligence  of  Southern  white  society  and  the  delay  of 
the  freedman's  enfranchisement — his  civil  emancipation — until 
the  "Old  South,"  instead  of  reorganizing  public  society  in  har- 
mony with  the  National  idea,  largely  returned  to  its  entrenchments 
in  the  notion  of  exclusive  white  rule.  Then,  too  late  to  avert  a 
new  strike,  and  as  little  more  than  a  defensive  offset,  the  freedman 
was  invested  with  citizenship  and  the  experiment  begun  of  try- 
ing to  establish  a  form  of  public  order,  wherein,  under  a  political 
equality  accorded  by  all  citizens,  to  all  citizens,  new  and 
old,  intelligence  and  virtue  would  be  so  free  to  combine, 
and  ignorance  and  vice  feel  so  free  to  divide,  as  to  insure  the 
majority's  free  choice  of  rulers  of  at  least  enough  intelligence 
and  virtue  to  secure  safety,  order  and  progress.  This  experi- 
ment, the  North  believed,  would  succeed,  and  since  this  was 


21 

the  organic  embodiment  of  the  American  idea  for  which  it  had 
just  shed  seas  of  blood,  it  stands  to  reason  the  North  would  not 
have  allowed  it  to  fail.  But  the  Old  South,  still  bleeding  from 
her  thousand  wounds,  but  as  brave  as  when  she  fired  her  first  gun, 
believed  not  only  that  the  experiment  would  fail,  but  also  that 
it  was  dangerous  and  dishonorable.  And  to-day,  both  in  North 
and  South,  a  widespread  impression  prevails  that  this  is  the  experi- 
ment which  was  tried  and  did  in  fact  fail.  Whereas  it  is  just 
what  the  Old  South  never  allowed  to  be  tried. 

This  is  the  whole  secret  of  the  Negro  Question's  vital  force  to- 
day. And  yet  the  struggle  in  the  Southern  States  has  never  been 
by  the  blacks  for  and  by  the  whites  against  a  black  supremacy, 
but  only  for  and  against  an  arbitrary  pure  white  supremacy. 
From  the  very  first  until  this  day,  in  all  the  freedman's  intellect- 
ual crudity,  he  has  held  fast  to  the  one  true,  National  doctrine  of 
the  absence  of  privilege  and  the  rule  of  all  by  all,  through  the 
common  and  steadfast  consent  of  all  to  the  free  and  frequent 
choice  of  the  majority.  He  has  never  rejected  white  men's  polit- 
ical fellowship  or  leadership  because  it  was  white,  but  only  and 
always  when  it  was  unsound  in  this  doctrine.  His  party  has 
never  been  a  purely  black  party  in  fact  or  principle.  The  "  solid 
black  vote  "  is  only  by  outside  pressure  solidified  about  a  prin- 
ciple of  American  liberty,  which  is  itself  against  solidity  and  de- 
stroys the  political  solidity  of  classes  wherever  it  has  free  play. 
But  the  "  solid  white  vote  " — which  is  not  solid  by  including  all 
whites,  but  because  no  colored  man  can  truly  enter  its  ranks, 
much  less  its  councils,  without  accepting  an  emasculated  eman- 
cipation— the  solid  white  vote  is  solid,  not  by  outside  pressure 
but  by  inherent  principle.  Solid  twice  over;  first,  in  each  State, 
from  sincere  motives  of  self-preservation,  solid  in  keeping  the  old 
servile  class,  by  arbitrary  classification,  servile  ;  and  then  solid 
again  by  a  tacit  league  of  Southern  States  around  the  assumed 
right  of  each  State  separately  to  postpone  a  true  and  complete 
emancipation  as  long  as  the  fear  remains  that,  with  full  American 
liberty — this  and  no  more — to  all  alike,  the  freedman  would  him- 
self usurp  the  arbitrary  domination  now  held  over  him  and  plun- 
der and  destroy  society. 

So,  then,  the  Southern  question  at  its  root  is  simply  whether 


22 

there  is  any  real  ground  sufficient  to  justify  this  fear  and  the  atti- 
tude taken  against  it.  Only  remove  this  fear,  which  rests  on  a 
majority  of  the  whole  white  South  despite  all  its  splendid,  well- 
proved  courage,  and  the  question  of  right,  in  law  and  in  morals, 
will  vanish  along  with  the  notion  of  necessity. 

Whoever  attempts  to  remove  this  apprehension  must  meet  it 
in  two  forms:  First,  fear  of  a  hopeless  wreck  of  public  govern- 
ment by  a  complete  supremacy  of  the  lower  mass;  and  second, 
fear  of  a  yet  more  dreadful  wreck  of  private  society  in  a  deluge  of 
social  equality. 

III. 

Now,  as  to  public  government,  the  freedman,  whatever  may 
be  said  of  his  mistakes,  Mas  never  shown  an  intentional  prefer- 
ence for  anarchy.  Had  he  such  a  bent  he  would  have  betrayed 
something  of  it  when  our  civil  war  offered  as  wide  an  opportunity 
for  its  indulgence  as  any  millions  in  bondage  ever  had.  He  has 
shown  at  least  as  prompt  a  choice  for  peace  and  order  as  any 
"lower  million"  ever  showed.  The  vices  said  to  be  his  in  inordi- 
nate degree  are  only  such  as  always  go  with  degradation,  and 
especially  with  a  degraded  status;  and  when,  in  Reconstruction 
years,  he  held  power  to  make  and  unmake  laws,  amid  all  his  deg- 
radation, all  the  efforts  to  confine  him  still  to  an  arbitrary  servile 
status,  and  all  his  vicious  special  legislation,  he  never  removed 
the  penalties  from  anything  that  the  world  at  large  calls  a  crime. 
Neither  did  he  ever  show  any  serious  disposition  to  establish  race 
rule.  The  whole  spirit  of  his  emancipation  and  enfranchisement, 
and  his  whole  struggle,  was,  and  is,  to  put  race  rule  of  all  sorts 
under  foot,  and  set  up  the  common  rule  of  all.  The  fear  of  anar- 
chy in  the  Southern  States,  then,  is  only  that  perfectly  natural 
and  largely  excusable  fear  that  besets  the  upper  ranks  of  society 
everywhere,  and  often  successfully  tempts  them  to  commit  in- 
equitable usurpations;  and  yet  a  fear  of  which  no  amount  of  power 
or  privilege  ever  relieves  them — the  fear  that  the  stupid,  the  des- 
titute, and  the  vicious  will  combine  against  them  and  rule  by  sheer 
weight  of  numbers. 

Majority  rule  is  an  unfortunate  term,  in  that  it  falsely  implies 
this  very  thing;  whereas  its  mission  in  human  affairs  is  to  remove 
precisely  this  danger.  J[n  fact  a  minority  always  rules.  At  least 


23 

it  always  can.  All  the  great  majority  ever  strives  for  is  the  power 
to  choose  by  what,  and  what  kind  of,  a  minority  it  shall  be  ruled. 
What  that  choosing  majority  shall  consist  of,  and  hence  the  wis- 
dom and  public  safety  of  its  choice,  will  depend  mainly  upon  the 
attitude  of  those  who  hold,  against  the  power  of  mere  numbers, 
the  far  greater  powers  of  intelligence,  of  virtue  and  of  wealth.  If 
these  claim,  by  virtue  of  their  own  self-estimate,  an  arbitrary  right 
to  rule  and  say  who  shall  rule,  the  lower  elements  of  society  will 
be  bound  together  by  a  just  sense  of  grievance,  and  a  well-ground- 
ed reciprocation  of  distrust,  the  forced  rule  will  continue  only  till 
it  can  be  overturned,  and  while  it  lasts  will  be  attended  by  largely 
uncounted  but  enormous  losses,  moral  and  material,  to  all  ranks 
of  society.  But  if  the  wise,  the  upright,  the  wealthy,  command 
the  courage  of  our  American  fathers  to  claim  for  all  men  a  com- 
mon political  equality,  without  rank,  station  or  privilege,  and  give 
their  full  and  free  adherence  to  government  by  the  consent  of  all 
to  the  rule  of  a  minority,  the  choice  of  the  majority  frequently 
appealed  to  without  respect  of  persons,  then  ignorance,  destitution, 
and  vice  will  not  combine  to  make  the  choosing  majority.  They 
cannot.  They  carry  in  themselves  the  very  principle  of  disinteg- 
ration. Without  the  outside  pressure  of  common  and  sore  griev- 
ance, they  have  no  lasting  powers  of  cohesion.  The  minority 
always  may  rule.  It  need  never  rule  by  force,  if  it  will  rule  by 
equity.  This  is  the  faith  of  our  fathers  of  the  Revolution,  and  no 
community  in  America  that  has  built  squarely  and  only  upon  it 
has  found  it  unwise  or  unsafe. 

This  is  asserted  with  all  the  terrible  misrule  of  Reconstruction 
days  in  full  remembrance.  For,  first  be  it  said  again,  that  sad 
history  came  not  by  a  reign  of  equal  rights  and  majority  rule,  but 
through  an  attempt  to  establish  them  while  the  greater  part  of 
the  wealth  and  intelligence  of  the  region  involved  held  out  sin- 
cerely, steadfastly,  and  desperately  against  them,  and  for  the 
preservation  of  unequal  privileges  and  class  domination.  The 
Reconstruction  party,  even  with  all  its  taxing,  stealing  and  de- 
frauding, and  with  the  upper  ranks  of  society  at  war  as  fiercely 
against  its  best  principles  as  against  its  bad  practices,  planted  the 
whole  South  with  public  schools  for  the  poor  and  illiterate  of  both 
races,  welcomed  and  cherished  the  missionaries  of  higher  educa- 


24 

tion,  and,  when  it  fell,  left  them  still  both  systems,  with  the  master- 
class converted  to  a  belief  in  their  use  and  necessity.  The  history 
of  Reconstruction  dispassionately  viewed,  is  a  final,  triumphant 
proof  that  all  our  American  scheme  needs  to  make  it  safe  and 
good,  in  the  South  as  elsewhere,  is  consent  to  it  and  participation 
in  it  by  the  law-abiding,  intelligent  portions  of  the  people,  with 
one  common  freedom,  in  and  between  high  life  and  low,  to  com- 
bine, in  civil  matters,  against  ignorance  and  vice,  in  high  life  and 
low,  across,  yet  without  disturbing,  the  lines  of  race  or  any  other 
private  rank  or  predilection. 

There  are  hundreds  of  thousands  in  the  Southern  States  who 
would  promptly  concede  all  this  in  theory  and  in  practice,  but  for 
the  second  form  of  their  fear :  the  belief  that  there  would  result  a 
confusion  of  the  races  in  private  society,  followed  by  intellectual 
and  moral  debasement  and  by  a  mongrel  posterity.  Unless  this 
can  be  shown  to  be  an  empty  fear,  our  Southern  problem  cannot 
be  solved. 

IV. 

The  mere  ambiguity  of  a  term  here  has  cost  much  loss.  The 
double  meaning  of  the  words  "social"  and  "society"  seems  to 
have  been  a  real  drawback  on  the  progress  of  political  ideas  a- 
mong  the  white  people  of  the  South.  The  clear  and  definite  term, 
civil  equality,  they  have  made  synonymous  with  the  very  vague 
and  indefinite  term,  social  equality,  and  then  turned  and  totally 
misapplied  it  to  the  sacred  domains  of  private  society.  If  the  idea 
of  civil  equality  had  rightly  any  such  application,  their  horror 
would  certainly  be  just.  To  a  forced  private  social  equality  the 
rest  of  the  world  has  the  same  aversion;  but  it  knows  and  feels  that 
such  a  thing  is  as  impossible  in  fact  as  it  is  monstrous  in  thought. 
Americans,  in  general,  know  by  a  century's  experience,  that  civil 
equality  makes  no  such  proposal,  bears  no  such  results.  They 
know  that  public  society— civil  society — comprises  one  distinct 
group  of  mutual  relations,  and  private  society  entirely  another, 
and  that  it  is  simply  and  only  evil  to  confuse  the  two.  They  see 
that  public  society  comprises  all  those  relations  that  are  imperson- 
al, unselective,  and  in  which  all  men,  of  whatever  personal  inequal- 
ity, should  stand  equal.  They  recognize  that  private  society  is 
its  opposite  hemisphere;  that  it  is  personal,  selective,  assertive,  ig- 


25 

nores  civil  equality  without  violating  it,  and  forms  itself  entirely 
upon  mutual  private  preferences  and  affinities.  They  agree  that 
civil  status  has  of  right  no  special  value  in  private  society,  and 
that  their  private  social  status  has  rightly  no  special  value  in  their 
public  social — i.e.,  their  merely  civil — relations.  Even  the  South- 
ern freedman  is  perfectly  clear  on  these  points ;  and  Northern  minds 
are  often  puzzled  to  know  why  the  whites  of  our  Southern  States, 
almost  alone,  should  be  beset  by  a  confusion  of  ideas  that  costs 
them  all  the  tremendous  differences,  spiritual  and  material,  be- 
tween a  state  of  truce  and  a  state  of  peace. 

But  the  matter  has  a  very  natural  explanation.  Slavery  was 
both  public  and  private,  domestic  as  well  as  civil.  By  the  plan- 
tation system  the  members  of  the  master-class  were  almost  con- 
stantly brought  into  closer  contact  with  slaves  than  with  their 
social  equals.  The  defensive  line  of  private  society  in  its  upper 
ranks  was  an  attenuated  one;  hence  there  was  a  constant,  well- 
grounded  fear  that  social  confusion — for  we  may  cast  aside  the 
term  "social  equality"  as  preposterous — that  social  confusion 
would  be  wrought  by  the  powerful  temptation  of  close  and  con- 
tinual contact  between  two  classes — the  upper  powerful  and  bold, 
the  under  helpless  and  sensual,  and  neither  one  socially  respon- 
sible to  the  other  either  publicly  or  privately.  It  had  already 
brought  about  the  utter  confusion  of  race  and  corruption  of  society 
in  the  West  Indies  and  in  Mexico,  and  the  only  escape  from  a 
similar  fate  seemed  to  our  Southern  master-class  to  be  to  annihi- 
late and  forget  the  boundaries  between  public  right  and  private 
choice,  and  treat  the  appearance  anywhere  of  any  one  visibly  of 
African  tincture  and  not  visibly  a  servant,  as  an  assault  upon  the 
purity  of  private  society,  to  be  repelled  on  the  instant  without 
question  of  law  or  authority,  as  one  would  fight  fire.  Now,  under 
slavery,  though  confessedly  inadequate,  this  was  after  all  the  only 
way ;  and  all  that  the  whites  in  the  Southern  States  have  over- 
looked is  that  the  conditions  are  changed,  and  that  this  pol- 
icy has  become  unspeakably  worse  than  useless.  Dissimilar 
races  are  not  inclined  to  mix  spontaneously.  The  common  en- 
joyment of  equal  civil  rights  never  mixed  two  such  races ;  it  has 
always  been  some  oppressive  distinction  between  them  that,  by 
holding  out  temptations  to  vice  instead  of  rewards  to  virtue,  has 


26 

done  it;  and  because  slavery  is  the  foulest  of  oppressions  it  makes 
the  mixture  of  races  in  morally  foulest  form.  Race  fusion  is  not 
essential  to  National  unity ;  such  unity  requires  only  civil  and  po- 
litical, not  private  social,  homogeneity.  The  contact  of  superior 
and  inferior- is  not  of  necessity  degrading;  it  is  the  kind  of  contact 
that  degrades  or  elevates;  and  public  equality — equal  public  rights,, 
common  public  liberty,  equal  mutual  responsibility — this  is  the 
great  essential  to  beneficent  contact  across  the  lines  of  physical, 
intellectual  and  moral  difference,  and  the  greatest  safeguard  of 
private  society  that  human  law  or  custom  can  provide. 

V. 

Thus  we  see  that,  so  far  from  a  complete  emancipation  of  the 
freedman  bringing  those  results  in  the  Southern  States  which  the 
white  people  there  so  justly  abhor,  but  so  needlessly  fear,  it  is  the 
only  safe  and  effectual  preventive  of  those  results,  ^and  final  cure 
of  a  state  of  inflammation  which  nothing  but  the  remaining  ves- 
tiges of  an  incompletely  abolished  slavery  perpetuate.  (I The  abo- 
lition of  the  present  state  of  siege  rests  with  the  Southern  white 
man.     He  can  abolish  it  if  he  will  with  safety  and  at  once../  The 
results  will  not  be  the  return  of  Reconstruction  days,  nor  the  in- 
coming of  any  sort  of  black  rule,  nor  the  supremacy  of  the  lower 
mass — either  white,  black  or  mixed ;  nor  the  confusion  of  ranks  and 
races  in  private  society;  nor  the  thronging  of  black  children   into- 
white  public  schools,  which  never  happened  even  in  the  worst 
Reconstruction  days;  nor  any  attendance  at  all  of  colored  chil- 
dren in  white  schools  or  of  white  in  colored,  save  where  exclusion 
would  work  needless  hardship;  nor  any  new  necessity  to  teach 
children — what  they  already  know  so  well — that  the  public  school 
relation  is  not  a  private  social  relation ;  nor  any  greater  or  less 
necessity  for  parents  to  oversee  their  children's  choice  of  compan- 
ions in  school  or  out;  nor  a  tenth  as  much  or  as  mischievous 
play-mating  of  white  and  colored  children  as  there  was  in  the 
days  of  slavery;  nor  any  new  obstruction  of  civil  or  criminal  jus- 
tice; nor  any  need  of  submitting  to  any  sort  of  offensive  contact 
from  a  colored  person,  that  it  would  be  right  to  resent  if  he  were 
white.    But  seven  dark  American-born  millions  would  find  them- 
selves freed  from  their  present  constant  liability  to  public  legalized 
indignity.     They  would  find  themselves,  for  the  first  time  in  their 


27 

history,  holding  a  patent,  with  the  seal  of  public  approval,  for  all 
the  aspirations  of  citizenship  and  all  the  public  rewards  of  virtue 
and  intelligence.  Not  merely  would  their  million  voters  find 
themselves  admitted  to,  and  faithfully  counted  at,  the  polls—wheth- 
er they  are  already  or  not  is  not  here  discussed — but  they  would 
find  themselves,  as  never  before,  at  liberty  to  choose  between 
political  parties.  These  are  some  of  the  good — and  there  need 
be  no  ill — changes  that  will  come  whenever  a  majority  of  the 
Southern  whites  are  willing  to  vote  for  them. 

There  is  a  vague  hope,  much  commoner  in  the  North  than  in 
the  South,  that  somehow,  if  everybody  will  sit  still,  "  time"  will 
bring  these  changes.  A  large  mercantile  element,  especially, 
would  have  the  South  "  let  politics  alone."  It  is  too  tjusy  to  un- 
derstand that  whatever  people  lets  politics  alone  is  doomed.  There 
are  things  that  mere  time  can  do,  but  only  vigorous  agitation  can 
be  trusted  to  change  the  fundamental  convictions  on  which  a  peo- 
ple has  built  society.  ^Time  may  do  it  at  last,  but  it  is  likely  to 
make  bloody  work  of  it.  For  either  foundation  idea  on  which 
society  may  build  must,  if  let  alone,  multiply  upon  itself.  The 
elevation  idea  brings  safety,  and  safety  constantly  commends  and 
intensifies  itself  and  the  elevation  idea.  The  subjugation  idea 
brings  danger,  and  the  sense  of  danger  constantly  intensifies  the 
subjugation  idea.  It  may  be  counted  on  for  such  lighter  things 
as  the  removal  of  animosities  and  suspicions,  and  this  in  our  Na- 
tion's case  it  has  done.  Neither  North  nor  South  now  holds,  or 
suspects  the  other  of  holding,  any  grudge  for  the  late  war.  But 
trusting  time  to  do  more  than  this  is  but  trusting  to  luck,  and 
trusting  to  luck  is  a  crime. 

What  is  luck  doing  ?  Here  is  the  exclusive  white  party  in  the 
Southern  States  calling  itself,  and  itself  only,  "The  South,"  pray- 
ing the  Nation  to  hold  off,  not  merely  its  interference,  but  its 
counsel — even  its  notice — while  it,  not  removes,  but  refines,  pol- 
ishes, decorates,  and  disguises  to  its  own  and  the  Nation's  eyes, 
this  corner-stone  of  all  its  own  and  the  true  South's,  the  whole 
South's  woes ;  pleading  the  inability  of  any  but  itself  to  "  under- 
stand the  negro,"  when  in  fact  itself  has  had  to  correct  more,  and 
more  radical  mistakes  about  the  negro  since  the  war  than  all  the 
Nation  beside ;  failing  still,  more  than  twenty  years  since  Recon- 


28 

struction  began  and  more  than  ten  since  its  era  closed,  to  offer 
any  definition  of  the  freedman's  needs  and  desires  which  he  can 
accept;  making  daily  statements  of  his  preferences  which  the  one 
hundred  newspapers  published  for  his  patronage,  and  by  himself, 
daily  and  unanimously  repudiate ;  trying  to  settle  affairs  on  the 
one  only  false  principle  of  public  social  order  that  keeps  them  un- 
settled ;  proposing  to  settle  upon  a  sine  qtta  non  that  shuts  out  of 
its  councils  the  whole  opposite  side  of  the  only  matter  in  question; 
and  holding  out  for  a  settlement  which,  whether  effected  or  not, 
can  but  perpetuate  a  disturbance  of  inter-state  equality  fatal  to 
the  Nation's  peace — a  settlement  which  is  no  more  than  a  refusal 
to  settle  at  all. 

Meanwhile,  over  a  million  American  citizens,  with  their  wives 
and  children,  suffer  a  suspension  of  their  full  citizenship,  and  are 
virtually  subjects  and  not  citizens,  peasants  instead  of  freemen. 
They  cannot  seize  their  rights  by  force,  and  the  Nation  would 
never  allow  it  if  they  could.  But  they  are  learning  one  of  the 
worst  lessons  class  rule  can  teach  them — exclusive,  even  morbid, 
pre-occupation  in  their  rights  as  a  class,  and  inattention  to  the  gen- 
eral affairs  of  their  communities,  their  States  and  the  Nation. 
Meanwhile,  too,  the  present  one-sided  effort  at  settlement  by 
subjugation  is  not  only  debasing  to  the  under  mass,  but  corrupt- 
ing to  the  upper.  For  it  teaches  these  to  set  aside  questions  of 
right  and  wrong  for  questions  of  expediency  ;  to  wink  at  and  at 
times  to  defend  and  turn  to  account  evasions,  even  bold  infrac- 
tions, of  their  own  laws,  when  done  to  preserve  arbitrary  class 
domination ;  to  vote  confessedly  for  bad  men  and  measures  as 
against  better,  rather  than  jeopardize  the  white  man's  solid  party, 
and  exclusive  power  ;  to  regard  virtue  and  intelligence,  vice  and 
ignorance,  as  going  by  race,  and  to  extenuate  and  let  go  unpros- 
ecuted  the  most  frightful  crimes  against  the  under  class,  lest  that 
class,  being  avenged,  should  gather  a  boldness  inconsistent  with 
its  arbitrarily  fixed  status ;  and  these  results  are  contrary  to  our 
own  and  to  all  good  government. 

VI. 

There  is  now  going  on  in  several  parts  of  the  South  a  re- 
markable development  of  material  wealth.  Mills,  mines,  fur- 
naces, quarries,  railways  are  multiplying  rapidly.  The  eye  that 


29 

cannot  see  the  value  of  this  aggrandizement  must  be  dull  indeed. 
But  many  an  eye,  in  North  and  South,  and  to  the  South's  loss, 
is  crediting  it  with  values  that  it  has  not.  To  many  the  "  New 
South  "  we  long  for  means  only  this  industrial  and  commercial 
expansion,  and  our  eager  mercantile  spirit  forgets  that  even  for 
making  a  people  rich  in  goods  a  civil  order  on  sound  foundations 
is  of  greater  value  than  coal  or  metals,  or  spindles  and  looms. 
May  the  South  grow  rich  !  But  every  wise  friend  of  the  South 
will  wish  besides  to  see  wealth  built  upon  public  provisions  for 
securing  through  it  that  general  beneficence  without  which  it  is 
not  really  wealth.  He  would  not  wish  those  American  States  a 
wealth  like  that  which  once  was  Spain's.  He  would  not  wish  to 
see  their  society  more  diligent  for  those  conditions  that  concen- 
trate wealth  than  for  those  that  disseminate  it.  Yet  he  must  see 
it.  That  is  the  situation,  despite  the  assurances  of  a  host  of  well- 
meaning  flatterers  that  a  New  South  is  laying  the  foundations  of 
a  permanent  prosperity.  They  cannot  be  laid  on  the  old  planta- 
tion idea,  and  much  of  that  which  is  loosely  called  the  New 
South  to-day  is  farthest  from  it — it  is  only  the  Old  South  re- 
adapting  the  old  plantation  idea  to  a  peasant  labor  and  mineral 
products.  Said  a  mine  owner  of  the  far  North  lately ;  "  We 
shall  never  fear  their  competition  till  they  get  rid  of  that  idea." 
A  lasting  prosperity  cannot  be  hoped  for  without  a  disseminated 
wealth,  and  public  social  conditions  to  keep  it  from  congestion. 
But  this  dissemination  cannot  be  got  save  by  a  disseminated  in- 
telligence, nor  intelligence  be  disseminated  without  a  disseminated 
education,  nor  this  be  brought  to  any  high  value,  without  liberty, 
responsibility,  private  inequality,  public  equality,  self-regard,  vir- 
tue, aspirations  and  their  rewards. 

Many  ask  if  this  new  material  development  at  the  South  will 
not  naturally  be  followed  by  adequate  public  provisions  for  this 
dissemination  by-and-by.  There  is  but  one  safe  answer:  That 
it  has  never  so  happened  in  America.  From  our  furthest  East 
to  our  furthest  West,  whenever  a  community  has  established 
social  order  in  the  idea  of  the  elevation  of  the  masses,  it  has 
planned,  not  for  education  and  liberty  to  follow  from  wealth  and 
intelligence,  but  for  wealth  and  intelligence  to  follow  from  educa- 
tion and  liberty ;  and  the  community  whose  intelligent  few  do 


30 

not  make  the  mass's  elevation  by  public  education  and  equal 
public  liberty  the  corner-stone  of  a  projected  wealth,  is  not  more 
likely  to  provide  it  after  wealth  is  achieved  and  mostly  in  their 
own  hands. 

Our  American  public  school  idea — American  at  least  in  con- 
trast with  any  dissimilar  notion — is  that  a  provision  for  public 
education  adequate  for  the  whole  people,  is  not  a  benevolent 
concession  but  a  paying  investment,  constantly  and  absolutely 
essential  to  confirm  the  safety  of  a  safe  scheme  of  government. 
The  maintenance  and  growth  of  public  education  in  the  Southern 
States,  as  first  established  principally  under  reconstruction  rule, 
sadly  insufficient  as  it  still  is,  is  mainly  due  to  the  partial  triumph 
of  this  idea  in  the  minds  of  the  Southern  whites,  and  its  eager 
acceptance,  with  or  without  discordant  conditions,  by  the  intelli- 
gent blacks,  and  in  no  region  is  rightly  attributable  to  an  excep- 
tionable increase  of  wealth.  Much  less  is  it  attributable,  as  is 
often  conjectured,  to  the  influx  of  Northern  capital  and  capitalists, 
bringing  Northern  ideas  with  them.  It  ought  to  go  without  say- 
ing, that  immigration,  with  or  without  capital,  will  always  try  to 
assimilate  itself  to  the  state  of  society  into  which  it  comes. 
Every  impulse  of  commerce  is  not  to  disturb  any  vexed  issue 
until  such  issue  throws  itself  immediately  across  the  path.  It 
never  purposely  molests  a  question  of  social  order.  So  it  is  in 
the  South. 

Certain  public  men  in  both  North  and  South  have  of  late 
years  made,  with  the  kindest  intentions,  an  unfortunate  misuse 
of  statistical  facts  to  make  it  appear  that  public  society  in  the 
South  is  doing,  not  all  that  should  be  done,  but  all  it  can  do,  for 
the  establishment  of  permanent  safety  and  harmony,  through  the 
elevation  of  the  lower  masses  especially,  in  the  matter  of  public 
education.  In  truth,  these  facts  do  not  prove  the  statement  they 
are  called  upon  to  prove,  and  do  the  Southern  States  no  kindness 
in  lulling  them  to  a  belief  in  it.  It  is  said,  for  instance,  that  cer- 
tain Southern  States  are  now  spending  more  annually  for  public 
education,  in  proportion  to  their  taxable  wealth,  than  certain 
Northern  States  noted  for  the  completeness  of  their  public  school 
systems.  Mississippi  may  thus  be  compared  with  Massachusetts. 
But  really  the  comparison  is  a  sad  injustice  to  the  Southern 


State,  for  a  century  of  public  education  has  helped  to  make  Mas- 
sachusetts so  rich  that  she  is  able  to  spend  annually  twenty  dol- 
lars per  head  upon  the  children  in  her  public  schools,  while  Mis- 
sissippi, laying  a  heavier  tax,  spends  upon  hers  but  two  dollars 
per  head.  Manifestly  it  is  unfair  to  compare  a  State  whose  pub- 
lic school  system  is  new  with  any  whose  system  is  old.  The 
public  school  property  of  Ohio,  whose  population  is  one  million,  is 
over  twice  as  great  as  that  of  ten  States  of  the  new  South,  whose 
population  is  three  and  a  half  times  as  large.*  And  yet  one 
does  not  need  to  go  as  far  as  the  "  new  West "  to  find  States 
whose  tax-payers  spend  far  more  for  public  education  than 
Southern  communities  thus  far  see  the  wisdom  or  need  of  invest- 
ing. With  one-third  more  wealth  than  Virginia,  and  but  one- 
tenth  the  percentage  of  illiteracy,  Iowa  spends  over  four  times  as 
much  per  year  for  public  instruction.  With  one-fourth  less 
wealth  than  Alabama,  and  but  one-fourteenth  the  percentage  of 
illiteracy,  Nebraska  spends  three  and  a  half  times  as  much  per 
year  for  public  instruction.  With  about  the  same  wealth  as  North 
Carolina  and  less  than  one-eighth  the  percentage  of  illiteracy, 
Kansas  spends  over  five  times  as  much  per  year  for  public  educa- 
tion. If  the  comparison  be  moved  westward  again  into  new 
regions,  the  Territory  of  Dakota  is  seen  making  an  "  expendi- 
ture in  the  year  per  capita  on  average  attendance  in  the  public 
schools"  of  $25. 77,  being  more  than  the  sum  of  the  like  per 
capita  expenditures  by  Mississippi,  South  Carolina,  Tennessee, 
North  Carolina,  Alabama  and  Georgia  combined.  In  Colorado 
it  is  about  the  same  as  in  Dakota,  while  in  Nevada  it  is  much 
greater  and  in  Arizona  twice  as  large.  As  to  comparative 
wealth,  the  taxable  wealth  of  Dakota  in  1880,  at  least,  was  but 
one  two-thousandth  part  of  that  of  the  six  States  with  which  it 
is  compared. 

Xow  what  is  the  real  truth  in  these  facts  ?  That  the  full 
establishment  of  this  American  public  school  idea  and  of  that 
elevation  idea  of  which  it  is  an  exponent,  and  which  has  had  so 
much  to  do  toward  making  the  people  of  the  Northern  States  the 
wealthiest  people  in  the  world,  waits  in  the  South  not  mainly  an 

*  See  Report  of  United  States  Commissioner  of  Education,  i883-'84,  page  21, 
last  column  of  table. 


350430 

A 


32 

increase  of  wealth  but  rather  the  simple  consent  of  the  Southern 
white  man  to  see  society's  best  and  earliest  safety,  the  quickest, 
greatest  and  most  lasting  aggrandizement  in  that  public  equality 
of  all  men,  that  national  citizenship,  wider  than  race  and  far 
wider  than  the  lines  of  private  society,  which  makes  the  eleva- 
tion of  the  masses,  by  everything  that  tends  to  moral,  aesthetical 
and  intellectual  education,  in  school  and  out  of  school,  the  most 
urgent  and  fruitful  investment  of  public  wealth  and  trust.  Just 
this  sincere  confession.  All  the  rest  will  follow.  The  black  man 
will  not  merely  be  tolerated  in 'his  civil  and  political  rights  as 
now  sometimes  he  is  and  sometimes  he  is  not ;  but  he  will  be 
welcomed  into,  and  encouraged  and  urged  to  a  true  understand- 
ing, valuation  and  acceptance  of  every  public  duty  and  respon- 
sibility of  citizenship,  according  to  his  actual  personal  ability  to 
respond. 

To  effect  this  is  not-the  herculean  and  dangerous  task  it  is 
sometimes  said  to  be.  (The  North  has  20,000,000  foreign  immi- 
grants to  Americanize,  and  only  this  way  to  do  it.  The  South, 
for  all  her  drawbacks,  has  this  comparative  advantage ;  that  her 
lower  mass,  however  ignorant  and  debased,  is  as  yet  wholly 
American  in  its  notions  of  order  and  government.  All  that  is 
wanting  is  to  more  completely  Americanize  her  upper  class,  a 
class  that  is  already  ruling  and  will  still  rule  when  the  change  is 
made ;  that  wants  to  rule  wisely  and  prosperously,  and  that  has 
no  conscious  intention  of  being  un-American.  Only  this:  To 
bring  the  men  of  best  blood  and  best  brain  in  the  South  to-day, 
not  to  a  new  and  strange  docrine,  but  back  to  the  faith  of  their 
fathers.  Let  but  this  be  done,  and  there  may  be  far  less  cry  of 
Peace,  Peace,  than  now,  but  there  will  be  a  peace  and  a  union 
between  the  Nation's  two  great  historic  sections  such  as  they 
have  not  seen  since  Virginia's  Washington  laid  down  his  sword, 
and  her  Jefferson  his  pen.  ) 


We  are  indebted  to  the  courtesy  of  the  AVc.1  York  Tribune  for  this  thoughtful  presenta- 
tion of  the  Negro  question. 


67 


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